Emily Feng
Emily Feng is NPR's Beijing correspondent.
Feng joined NPR in 2019. She roves around China, through its big cities and small villages, reporting on social trends as well as economic and political news coming out of Beijing. Feng contributes to NPR's newsmagazines, newscasts, podcasts, and digital platforms.
Previously, Feng served as a foreign correspondent for the Financial Times. Based in Beijing, she covered a broad range of topics, including human rights and technology. She also began extensively reporting on the region of Xinjiang during this period, becoming the first foreign reporter to uncover that China was separating Uyghur children from their parents and sending them to state-run orphanages, and discovering that China was introducing forced labor in Xinjiang's detention camps.
Feng's reporting has also let her nerd out over semiconductors and drones, travel to environmental wastelands, and write about girl bands and art. She's filed stories from the bottom of a coal mine; the top of a mosque in Qinghai; and from inside a cave Chairman Mao once lived in.
Her human rights coverage has been shortlisted by the British Journalism Awards in 2018, recognized by the Amnesty Media Awards in February 2019 and won a Human Rights Press merit that May. Her radio coverage of the coronavirus epidemic in China earned her another Human Rights Press Award, was recognized by the National Headliners Award, and won a Gracie Award. She was also named a Livingston Award finalist in 2021.
Feng graduated cum laude from Duke University with a dual B.A. degree from Duke's Sanford School in Asian and Middle Eastern studies and in public policy.
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Jiang Zemin rose to power in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square protests and leaves a legacy of economic reforms — but also tight political control. -
The protests drew on deep public dissatisfaction with the country's strict COVID-19 controls. A Chinese government official blamed the unrest on "forces with ulterior motives."
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A deadly fire in Urumqi, China, sparked the mass protests that are currently spreading across the country — with residents demanding democratic reform and an end to COVID-19 controls.
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Protests in support of democratic reforms and against Covid controls are growing across China. They began after a fire killed ten people who witnesses say were trapped in a building under lockdown.
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Earlier this month, China relaxed its strict Covid-related rules. But lockdowns are back as infections have risen.
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President Biden says preliminary information contests the idea that a deadly explosion in Poland, along the border with Ukraine, was the result of a missile fired by Russia.
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After two decades of fighting in the Middle East, the U.S. Army is shifting its focus back to the Pacific to counter a rising China.
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China's communist party is choosing its leaders for the next five years. The party faces extraordinary challenges both inside and outside China — particularly when it comes to the U.S. and Taiwan.
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China's Communist Party Congress is set to get under way on Sunday with the country's leader Xi Jinping delivering a major speech.
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It started in July. The callers live in Gourd Island, and they were hoping to share an important message that they say was being ignored by their local authorities.
